Category Archives: Local

An Ode to the Lamrichs!

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[Editor's note: on Saturday, two of my favourite people in Vancouver the world, Kurt and Theodora Lamrich, tied the knott - at the Planetarium, and it was epic. And their reception at Main Street's Heritage Hall was equally epic and unfolded as a true representation of the couple's love and character. For example, the hashtag #TheoandKurtkiss was trending on Twitter by the end of the evening. The wedding was, like there love is, truly galactic. More importantly, it was foretold by one of William Shakespeare's little known comedic characters, Hornlet. The poem unfolds below. Enjoy!]

HORNLET: To wed, or not to wed–that is the question:

Whether ’tis proper to wait four years to marry

Finding each other, your quite good fortune

Did you take arms against a sea of troubles

And with our help, ended them. Tonight, no sleep–

No more–and when you sleep to say we end.

Marriage, tell your story together forever

That love found in you. ‘Tis a declaration

We devoutly wished. To love, to wed–

Marriage—to live your dreams: ay, there’s the rub,

For in your marriage what dreams may come

When you are nestled in your lovers’ coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

To grow old together of so long life.

For you will bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’ NPA is wrong, the Heinrich’s qualified

The pangs of bromance love, did some delay,

The insolence of Hornlet, and fiery burns

That nutted merit Lammer’s friendship makes,

When she herself might cross the hall take

View a bare bottom? What do neighbours share,

Some advice to live your married life,

Or the dread of zombies after death,

The undiscovered marriage, from you’s bourn

No traveller returns, journey you will,

And will you rather bear the love you have

And fly to places that we know not of?

This wedding does make lovers of us all (not literally, that’d be weird),

And thus the serious tone of my elocution

Is shaded o’er with a much happy thought,

Your enterprise of red hair and eyebrows

With this regard your currents intertwined

And love the name of Lamrich. — Soft you now,

The fair Theodora! — Kurt, kiss her crimsons

And we all your love remember.

- Exeunt

XYBOOM Conference Discusses Workplace Community

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[Editor's note: whether you're an un-or-under-employed Millennial, Gen Xer, or Baby Boomer, you should be paying attention to an upcoming awesometastic collaboration between Service Canada, My Loudspeaker, the post-secondary community, and many change-making businesses from Metro Vancouver and beyond. It's called the XYBOOM Conference and it will be community-building at its finest!]

Vancouver, BC – January 10, 2012 – When a business loses an employee, it loses more than a staff member: employee turnover is estimated to cost more than double the cost of retainment. Loss of productivity, resources and time spent re-hiring and training are some of the burdens of employee replacement. The BC Business Council urges businesses to be more competitive in their retention strategies, suggesting investing in succession planning and staff development as solutions. The XYBOOM Conference seeks to address these issues with a dynamic, intergenerational approach.

Sustainable hiring systems and employee development and retention are key topics to be addressed at the conference on January 20th. This unique initiative, funded primarily by Service Canada brings togther business professionals and youth with experts from three generations – X,Y and Baby Boomer – to collaborate on finding strategies and solutions on mitigating the growing labour shortage.

The conference offers more than ten industry panelists who have diverse career backgrounds – including expertise in human resources, intercultural understanding, workplace organization and strategic marketing – as well as engaging, participatory workshops sessions, guaranteeing attendees will leave with strategies and insights on the issues at hand.

“The conference plays an important role in mitigating the pending labour shortage as baby boomers exit the workforce” says Alden Habacon, UBC Director of Intercultural Understanding Strategy Development and XYBOOM panelist. With baby boomers beginning to retire and a looming labour shortage, employee replacement is becoming a growing financial burden for unprepared businesses. Higher retention rates give businesses a competitive edge during labour shortages.

Business applications for XYBOOM will be accepted at www.xyboom.ca.

Hosted by My Loud Speaker, the XYBOOM Conference will be held on January 20th from 9-5pm at the Yaletown Roundhouse. This not-for-profit event will also include a live streaming feature for off-site youth participants across the Lower Mainland, XYBOOM awards for businesses, case study reports and an interactive art installation created by Gen Why Media Project at the W2 atrium from Jan 19-21st.

Please visit www.xyboom.ca for more information on the conference, issues at hand, and a complete guest panelist list.

Devon Wong – Media Relations
604 250 4662 | www.xyboom.ca
XYBOOM: January 20, 2012

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Masthead photo (The Train at the Roundhouse Theatre in Yaletown) courtesy of goldberg

Will Vancouver’s Ferries Ever Make a Comeback?

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It’s been over 60 years since the last crossing between West Van’s Dundarave pier and the Vancouver Wharf, yet its memory and talk of its resurrection live on. In fact, it’s always been a bit of a surprise and disappointment to me that there aren’t more boat transportation options in a city with so many waterways. Is the demand just not there? Would operating costs be too high?

1920s, West Vancouver Ferry crossing the Burrard Inlet, Archives Item#: SGN 1123

Before the Lion’s Gate Bridge there was a ferry linking Vancouver’s Downtown with West Vancouver’s Ambleside neighbourhood. And at one time  ferries bound for Vancouver Island serviced both false creek and the downtown core. The rise of the car and the parallel construction of the city’s major inner-city bridges spelled the end of these busy, working ferries. Check out this great post by Miss 604 describing the evolution of West Vancouver’s storied ferry service which ended with the Lions Gate ribbon cutting in 1947.

As recently as 2010, West Van did a 6 month trial run of the old service to downtown which it then abruptly cancelled. I can’t seem to find out why, but it wasn’t due to lack of demand from Vancouverites as far as I can tell. I wonder how West Enders and Yaletowners would respond to a ferry service between their neighbourhoods and the North Shore. Pretty well, I would think, particularly when these are communities with below average per capita car ownership.

Am I just dreaming that inner city ferries could even survive given our dependence on four-wheeled traffic and  bridges? What would it take to bring some of these old ferry services back on line?

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Masthead photo courtesy of rollanb

Streetfront Builds a Community for Troubled Youth Around Running

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Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Courier

Hidden away in a pair of joined portables on the cusp of Britannia Secondary’s property is one of the Vancouver School Board’s most dynamic and inspiring programs.

It’s called Streetfront. Captained by Head Teacher Trevor Stokes, Streefront is an alternative program aimed at giving kids that don’t fit into regular secondary school a second chance by making them work for it. How? Marathon running. For the past decade, Stokes has been taking bunches of youth to compete (and finish) in the Seattle and Vancouver Marathons. Frequently the youngest competitors of these 42.195 kilometer races are Streetfront youth.

For Stokes, the marathon is a perfect metaphor for his students’ lives, particularly the lives of troubled kids used to quitting (and being quitted on). He’s fond of saying that during a marathon, there are 42,195 opportunities to quit. That his students choose to push their physical limits and persevere says a lot. Their drive to train and prepare over the months of less glamorous running in the rain and mud of Vancouver leading up to the run says even more.

Streetfront youth run three times a week and also do a wide range of other physical activities like soccer, basketball and skiing. Their runs take them everywhere. They run to nearby parks one day and then all the way to Deep Cove (in another suburb of the Lower Mainland) or Stanley Park the next day. Stokes says the running instils an impressive amount of discipline and structure in lives that frequently completely lack it.

The program is one of a number of innovative alternative programs offered throughout the city. It’s designed for Grade 8 – 10 students. During the semester, the students spend approximately 35 days out of 190 school days in the outdoor environment. This includes three full day camp trips. In between the runs and outdoor excursions, students work on math, sciences, socials and English.

The results have been inspiring. Some students that have failed or been kicked out of several schools thrive at the Streetfront program.  Others have managed to pull their lives together, find work, enter back into secondary school and go on to university. Then there are the alumni. Stokes says groups of them still keep coming back to run with him and his students, years after graduating. Talk about a powerfully inspiring community.

Winter

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Winter has been slow arriving this year. In a lot of ways it is hard to complain. The warmer weather is easier on our energy bills and makes for an less stressful commute, especially as a transit strike since October still has me driving when I’d much rather be reading, listening to music, or doing a better job with my gumboot posts. But at the same time there are a lot of parts of winter that I’ve been looking forward to that as a result of the warmer weather I’ve put off. But in the last couple of weeks winter has shown up in Toronto, the air is crisp and there is snow on the ground. I want to share a few things that make the dark, cold, snowy (or rainy) months something for me to enjoy and hope you too find positivity in the months ahead.

Getting (and Sleeping) Outside.

I wasn’t always a fan of spending time outside in winter until I started running a few years ago and kept on running right through winter.  (Check out Jim’s past post on the lonely community of winter runners).  I then realized that being outside in winter makes those dark vitamin D deprived months a lot better. Sure there aren’t seemly endless hours of sunshine and instead there are layers of every type of clothing imaginable, but there also aren’t sunburns or mosquitoes.  This year, Jim and I are taking our quest to embrace winter a step further with our plan to complete a whole year of camping every month.  And after sleeping outside on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, with temperature dipping close to -20C the first night and waking up to a white Christmas the next, I can say that I’m looking forward to more outside time in the months ahead.

Seasonal Hobbies (and hobbies that adapt to the season).

When I’m not outside in winter I enjoy being curled up on a coach with cat on my lap, watching TV, which I do way more of in the winter (I’m re-watching The Wire right now).  Two additional hobbies make this better, knitting and beer.  I’m a seasonal knitter and it wasn’t until last week that I picked up the needles again, which coincided with Toronto’s first substantial snowfall.  It means that when my tendency is more towards hibernation than outside, I end up with something cozy coincidentally makes winter better.  Beer, which I’ve recently started brewing, had to undergo some adaptations for winter, which we’re still working out.  The brewery has moved from friends’  backward to our apartment for the winter, where our back deck’s overhang and ground-level bathtub (for the beer chilling) means we can brew through the cold months.  And as long as we figure out how to adjust for the higher evaporation rate in winter we’ll keep ending up with amazing beer.

Tomatoes, Endings and Beginnings

And finally, what would one of my lists be without a reference to tomatoes.  I’ve just cooked my last fresh tomatoes a couple of days ago. That’s right, tomatoes that I grew on my back deck that have been slowly ripening wrapped in newspaper in the months since they’ve been picked in the fall.  They were delicious.  And while that should make me sad, it is only a mere month and a half until I plant tomato seeds again.  In the meantime, I have cans of crushed tomatoes, homemade salsa, pizza sauce, and ketchup for the down-time in mid-winter.

What makes you happy about winter? 

Lessons in Culinary Community Building

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Picture a long festive table decked with candles and lined with  a dozen smiling faces. Surely, all the ingredients for sharing of food, laughter and good conversation? Well, not so much.

As I sat down excited to spend the evening catching up with everyone, I realized a good third of the long table was out of earshot and I was confined to chatting only with my immediate neighbour. Others dishes were also out of tasting/sharing range. By the end of the evening, I left for home feeling unfulfilled -  increasingly convinced  that other cultures, particularly in Asia, but, oddly, as close as Switzerland, know where it’s at when it comes to shared dining. Here’s why:

Circle Sitting:

Rectangular tables are recipes for isolation and are basically retrograde – some sort of throwback to medieval banqueting. They’re also hierarchical when you think about it. Why do we need a “Head of the table”, for example? Sitting in a circle does away with all that and facilitates a shared social and culinary experience. Chinese Dim-sum restaurants have got it right.

Cooking (!) the food at the table:

Last year’s Christmas highlight was having endless Swiss Raclette with my family. A stack of cheese and a two little propane fired pans set up around our coffee table was all it took to have an interactive, collaborative and leisurely meal.

Japanese 'Hot Potting'

 

This year, the highlight was my first Japanese Hot Pot experience with six friends. Again, we relaxed around two bubbling cookers, working together to keep the pots full of pre-prepared seafood, mushrooms, kim-chi and other delicacies.

Admittedly my international experience is limited and hence my examples are too. But I feel it’s safe to say the West has a lot to learn. Sure – we’re good around a campfire with wieners and marshmallows, but it’d be great to bring that communal experience more regularly into our homes. Chopping the corners off all tables square is good start!

 

 

 

Stories from the Writers’ Room: Kids, Creativity and Careers

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A burgeoning superstar being tutored by a gentleman in a plaid shirt who needs to do a better job of knowing when the camera's on him...

Last week I was lucky enough to work with Sarah Maitland and the Kidsafe Writers’ Room team to create and deliver some superawesome – and super educational – literacy programming for kids from East Vancouver during their Winter Holiday Break. The program content was career-related – Wait, where are you going? No, trust me, it was fun and not serious at all and you will enjoy reading this!- and it was absolutely inspiring to work with over 160 kids as they invented their jobs of the future.

Fun fact: a student who enrolled in college or university in September 2011 will probably work in a job that does not exist today. For this reason, I often encourage post-secondary students who I meet to imagine and/or create future work that will address future challenges/opportunities and to consider the skills that will be needed to tackle this kind of work. It’s not my idea, but one that stems from guru/personal-hero, Jim Bright, who teaches the aptly-named Chaos Theory of Careers to students, practitioners and job seekers the world-over.

Needless to say, I was extremely curious and very excited to see how the kids, who ranged in age from five to fifteen, treated this exercise. For starters, here is a selection of some of the job titles that were created:

  • Teacher
  • Space Cooker
  • Cleaner
  • Driver
  • The World Helpers (there was a “Kids with Problems” helper, an Animal Helper, and a Health Helper)
  • Sky Welder
  • Inventor
  • Physicist
  • Super Spy
  • Star Gatherer
  • Owner of a Petting Zoo for Endangered Species
  • Poop Collector
  • TV Watcher
  • Video Game Tester
  • Fart Soldier
  • Princess
  • Social Worker
  • Toy Maker
  • Solar Plane Engineer
  • Veterinarian
  • Inventor of the Massaging Toilet

Interesting. And awesome.

So, how did the kids get here? Well, before working with some exceptional volunteer tutors to complete an activity sheet (pictured), I engaged the kids in a discussion about jobs – and work – that has come and gone over the last 150 years; the idea was that the kids needed to know what work started and stopped, and when it did, in order to get a sense of what might come in the future. The discussion was actually more of a yell-fest (there should be more yelling in school, in my opinion), as I brought up volunteers who held up a picture of a job (e.g. Lamplighter or Pony Express Rider), which I explained to the group, and then moved it along a giant time line (crafted on a huge piece of white paper), which spanned from 1875 to 2025. When they got to a point on the time line that the audience didn’t agree with, we all booed. And when the kid got to the right spot (this differed from group to group, as some of the kids felt that vinyl record production stopped in 2010) everybody cheered.

And that’s how we got to the activity sheets. Here are some examples of the great work these kids did:

I’ll go so far as to say that pretty much everybody enjoyed the group-activity (even Lucy, the intractable volunteer who experienced/put-up-with all 10 of my workshops); however, watching the kids – especially the boys – tackle the worksheets was a bit different. About half of the kids immediately took to the activity. The others, well, I can safely say – and I say it with much fairness – that not everyone became immediately super-enthusiastic about their career during the holidays…when they’re eight years old. And here’s the magical thing: as soon as the activity was framed with the questions ‘what do you like to do?’ and ‘how can you turn that into something that you could do for work?’ nearly everyone got into it. Oh, and the fact that the kids got to draw pictures as themselves doing the work was pretty darn fantastic. Especially the Fart Soldier!

Describing the very good feelings that bubbled within when the kids proudly shared their pictures and stories with me and especially when they excitedly (and some, I’ll admit, begrudgingly) commented on the value of the exercise and that thinking about a future career – or simply what careers might look like in the future – was “really helpful” or “important” or “pretty cool” is difficult to say the least. So I’ll just say that working with kids in a way that helps them to think about blending interests, talent, passion, and future possibilities in the world of work was as enjoyable as it was meaningful.

So, what’s the work that you want to tackle in the future?

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All photos courtesy of Sarah Maitland

How to Shelter Everyone – Lessons from First United Church

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Does everyone deserve a place to sleep? Photo courtesy of quinet

Nothing spoils Christmas like thought of dozens of people sleeping outside in cold, wet Vancouver weather. It’s been an ongoing struggle for years and isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

In 2008, shortly after the municipal election and right before the city was blanketed in dumps of snow, the city, province and non-profit housing leaders were able to open HEAT (Homeless Emergency Action Team) shelters to put the option of a roof over the head of some of the city’s most vulnerable individuals.

For the past three years, ground-zero for the emergency housing effort has been First United Church. Each winter night, Rev Ric Matthews, Sandra Severs and their church staff find beds (or pews) for hundreds of hard to house, hardcore, street homeless people. The shelter was hard to miss. A block east of Main off Hastings St, it is constantly surrounded by a gaggle of street people and their shopping carts full of belongings.

Mathews, Severs and their team were committed to housing anyone and everyone who needed help. No-one would be turned away, regardless of who they were, what they’d done in the past, where they were supposed to be living or how many people were trying to get in on a given night. You’d think such a commitment of open-armed acceptance would be welcomed by civic and provincial leaders looking to combat street homelessness. And it was, at least for the first few years.

But then complaints started to roll in. There were reports of sexual assaults by some shelter residents against others. It was evident that many of the government’s “best practices” weren’t being followed at First United. Then the city’s fire department got involved when it came to light that the fire code was being violated by the number of people sleeping in the shelter in a number of nights. The church leadership’s refusal to turn anyone out into the cold didn’t square with their insurance and liability contracts. The issue came to a head First United was forced to to turn away 27 people in one night due to fire safety bylaws. Matthews, Severs and another operational manager promptly resigned and a media uproar flared as the issue of shelter best practices vs. exclusion of the needy came to the forefront. Matthews summed it up aptly in a recent interview with the CBC:

We need a separate way of trying to deal with folk who fall through the cracks… The problem is that while that’s totally appropriate and necessary, there are folk who get excluded by that process. By the very definition of the word, there are folk who are seen to be a threat to others and who can’t be inside of that facility.

Now Matthews and his top lieutenants have resigned, BC Housing’s funding for the shelter has come to an end and First United will no longer be offering 200 shelter spaces to some of the city’s most marginalized citizens. Two new housing shelters have been announced by the province to replace First United’s stock of beds, but these will likely not be able to operate with the same “open-arms” approach of First United. Whether there will still be as many places for aggressive, criminal, alcoholic, or heavily drug addicted homeless folks remains to be seen.

One thing is certain, the demand for housing (especially as it gets colder) from this particular hard-to-house demographic is not likely to evaporate any time soon. The loss of an organization committed to housing and servicing this population could be a significant blow to the efforts of Vancouver and Victoria to deal with the Metro Vancouver homelessness crisis.

While it’s understandable that leaders in both the United Church, city and province would be uneasy with First United’s “no one will be turned away”, I wonder what will happen when dozens of these 200 street homeless people hit the streets, not beds, in the coming cold winter nights.

Photo courtesy of jmv

Amazing Sports Fusion

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It’s a well known sports fact that the Vancouver Canucks build pre-game team-based-community-winning awesomeness by playing soccer. After all, with so many players from different national and cultural backgrounds, it makes sense, I guess, for the guys to get their blood flowing and joints loosened by playing the sport that is the most accessible, celebrated and beautiful one on Earth. You know, hockey soccer football!

And then, last night, Daniel Sedin took the Vancouver Canucks’ penchant for pre-game soccer-playing to amazing new levels. Because he did this:

Is this our first glimpse of a new sport that, for lack of a better word, I will call sockey? Has Daniel Sedin found a secret weapon that he will try to exploit for months and years to come? Will kids from Vancouver and Sweden (because nowhere else knows or cares about Twin Power) incur head injuries by emulating Daniel and banging really, really, really hard pieces of hockey equipment with their heads and faces? Will Eric Hassli bust out a hockey stick as part of future goal celebrations? Was the mediocre-at-best Parker/Stone vehicle BASEketballs actually a forward-thinking, bang-on prediction about where sport is headed?

I’m not sure what will happen to our global sporting community in the coming days, months, years, and decades, but I do know that we’ve witnessed something dexterously special and, possibly, have seen through a window of sport fusion into a future of people heading hockey pucks, kicking basketballs, bicycle-spiking volleyballs, and inappropriately wielding hockey sticks on the football pitch. And such things are amazing.

Finally, whatever the context of our sporting future, Steve Nash was fusing sports into each other before anyone announcing games for TSN thought it was cool.

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Masthead photo courtesy of Dooq

Food Charters: building a food community

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As part of my work I get to be involved in some really interesting projects.  One of the latest is the development of a food charter.  A food charter is a statement of values and principles to guide a community’s food policy. People from a broad spectrum of community interests and organizations meet and discuss their concerns and desires around food and agriculture policy in order to come up with a common vision and set of principles. These form the basis of a unique, local, community food charter.

Food Charters are still fairly new.  Toronto has had one since 2000, Sudbury since 2004, and Vancouver since 2007.  In the past three years at least half a dozen other communities have adopted them and even more are starting to work on them.  When a food charter is adopted by a municipal council it becomes a public document to guide decision-making.  It also can be endorsed by other organizations and form the basis of partnerships to work toward common goals.  In many ways, the food charters adopted so far look fairly similar.  I imagine the small steering committee that I’m on could sit down and write it over an afternoon and it wouldn’t look that different from what we are likely to end up with.  But while having a statement of shared values might be the obvious outcome that we want to achieve, an even more important outcome is the relationships that the process of co-developing a Food Charter will forge.

One of the things that I like most about the Food Charter process so far is it has been a tool to bring together stakeholders from a range of different backgrounds, including health, agriculture, environment, tourism, processing, retail, transportation, local, regional and provincial government, social equity, poverty, waste management, and education.  Individuals and organizations that have never been in the same room before have come together to discuss the Food Charter.  To me, this means that even in the main goal of getting a Food Charter adopted doesn’t happen right away that’s OK.  The relationship building that is occurring during the process of meetings and community engagement is already incubating new projects.  Even after one public meeting an action plan to go along with the charter started to emerge and at the top of that list was the need to collaborate, cooperate, network and share.  A new food community is budding and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.